January 10, 2014

One of the reasons for coming back to NZ from Australia is that we believed those meteorologists who, for a decade, had been saying that climate change would hit Australia harder than almost anywhere else in the world. So, while American denialists are crowing about how cold its been so "global warming is a lie", we get this;

Heat pushing farmers beyond limit

Vast tracts of central and northern Australia are gripped by an unrelenting drought that is decimating cattle herds and threatening to force pastoralists off their land.

Scattered rain has fallen over the past two days across some dehydrated parts of Queensland, and a searing heatwave that drove temperatures into the high 40s is now easing.

But weather forecasters see little chance of drought-breaking rains before autumn, with temperatures expected to remain above-average until March at least.

The heatwave pushed the mercury to more than 48C in the hottest parts of the state, dropping birds from the sky and killing thousands of fruit bats in Queensland and New South Wales.

Some climate bloggers are still casting around for more appropriate terms than global warming, even if that is literally the truth and the simplest statement of what is happening, "climate change" doesn't seem to cut it as conveying enough urgency and the other day I saw someone trying "climate disruption" as well.

I'm tending towards "the end of climate". The whole point of even discussing climate is that it gives us a framework for making decisions about water management, what to grow and where etc. Its a statistical, backwards-looking tool that has depended on the inertia of the global weather systems that have reliably cycled over years and decades, producing similar series of warm, wet, windy, cold days that we have called seasons and on which we have come to rely.

I say we can';t rely any more on the past being a predictor because the global heat management system has become chaotic, all the patterns are breaking down. Last year at this time we were entering the worst NZ drought in 70 years while people were drowning in Australian floods and catchment dams were being spilled to stop them over topping. Since then we have had the wettest May on record around our place, followed by a mini winter drought, some rain, then another dry stretch in spring.

This year the Aussies have returned to relentless drought, Chicago has been colder than Antarctica and we are having the perfect summer with a few days of fine warm weather followed by a day or so with rain. It couldn't be better, even the temperatures have been in a range that has kept mildews and moulds at bay, although the insect pests are a bit higher than before, I think.

Like most people around here, I was expecting another drought, which is why we sold off 3 of our 5 cows and had several dams and ponds dug. We didn't expect them to fill till next winter and when I bought a bag of grass seed to get some cover on the bare earth, the guy at the store said it was a waste of time, that I'd be back for more in Autumn. I agreed with him, but I also said that, although I was expecting a drought, nowhere is it written that we have to have one. I sowed the grass and a lot of it is growing well. It will need more in autumn, but for now it was worth the bet.

And the dams are nearly full.

Pacific weather systems are driven by the southern oscillation index which, for a couple of years now, has been in neutral, neither pushing one thing nor another. I saw it called "La Nada" rather than El Nino or La Nina. The bad news is that La Nada predicts nothing at all, any kind of weather is possible.

Which means we have to farm and garden for every eventuality, expecting some of the bets to fail. That is going to drive up the cost of food even more because for every spud or apple we harvest, maybe 3 other bets will have failed. That is food insecurity.

Just don't look for anyone in the public eye even beginning to broach that conversation, let alone talking about the end of climate.

...the possibility space for change opens up when we connect different people who can begin resonating together around shared stories, opportunities, and dreams. It’s a process of liberating people from the confines of clusters of sameness and ideological colonialism so they can move toward more diverse connections and pragmatic alignments.

The phrase clusters of sameness resonates for me and I think organisations often clog up with those. He continues:

the fusion of difference and resonance is a powerful approach because in that space, people move away from trying to change each other, which opens the space for the possibilities of creating innovative.. changes.. Resonant listening to one another’s differences allows us to join in both-and innovations that could never be possible in an either-or constrained world

I agree about the processes, but I think the crucial thing that gets left out of all this is that there is no way to steer the process towards a "desirable" (for whomever) outcome, nor can we determine the result in advance.

We live in a control-oriented mindset, change that we do not initiate frightens us and we try to reassert whatever control we thought we had, change that we do initiate gets out of control very quickly and we waste more resources trying to get back in control.

In every case we resist any change that we don't think we can determine in advance. But we live in a real world where change is permanent and uncontrolled. Hell I remember writing in an essay in high school something to the effect that "in order to maintain a constant relationship with a constantly changing world, we have to change, constantly".

I thought it was pretty cool then and I still agree with its foundation, the only thing I'd add is that the constant relationship is itself impossible, that changes too.

The whole idea of change management is a crock. Change, like shit, happens. Our biggest problem is that we are not inclined, nor do we learn, nor are we taught as part of our education, to understand, adapt, participate in or benefit from the changes that happen. Still less are we able to abandon changes that are short term wins but long term failures.

For me, this is about opening space so that we can explore experiences fully, without the pressure to problem-solve.

I'd love that to be true but I think we are running out of the lleisure we've had to be purely creative. The number and urgency of problems that we are going to have to solve, on a personal and daily basis, as well as a community and national one, is getting bigger, faster. Those of us, like me, who have had it damned easy all our lives and had the luxury of being able to invent, innovate and think about the world rather than get our hands dirty in it are going to spend the rest of those lives working much harder for much less money and often less return of all kinds.

With dwindling resources, the small problems that we simply threw some money at are going to become harder to deal with and the big problems such as climate change and PO are starting to cause medium sized problems such as landslips and crop failures that just wont go away. We've had 2 generations of cruising on the capital, from here on we will be paddling like hell to stay afloat.

If anything we need tools like open space and theatre sports as a form of rapid prototyping; spaces where we can bring hard problems, trial a bunch of possible solutions and take them away to work on them.

October 04, 2009

Harrison Owen created, or maybe he just channelled, the Open Space process many years ago. He says he did so in two martinis and 20 minutes - pretty productive for a process that's been used hundreds of thousands of times around the world.

Here's Harrison talking about the paradox of leadership in a self-organising world. It's fabulous stuff. He serves his metaphorical liquor 100% proof and with great charm. I certainly feel challenged to up my game in future when talking about this stuff.

Owen, and possibly Johnnie and others still want to talk about leadership and, if they are right about self organising systems and I'm sure they are, then it is not fruitful.

It begs the questions of how we get to decide where we want to lead, how we decide whose leadership to accept, including our own. and leaves unspoken the issue that we almost always abandon those leaders because they fail us. Leadership embodies exactly the kind of idea that Johnnie and Harrison argue so strongly against, that of being able to stand outside the system and, to some degree, direct it enough, or disrupt it enough, to instigate changes in a desired direction.

Leadership is change directed, management is homeostatic, but both entail an ability to stand outside, and you can't.

Which raises for me the much more interesting question of how real change occurs, how actual decisions are made and how they so often offer such great potential that is equally often fail and produce outcomes that can be significantly worse than the problem they were supposed to solve.

I've spent 2 years working around my property with an overall objective of it being as productive and as sustainable as possible. I am building and implementing stuff now that I had no concept of when I first started, I am using spaces that have been transformed utterly from what we inherited and there is much more to come. But I had, and have, no plan.

Along the way I've developed what I recently started calling "listening to the garden", literally standing still inside the space, looking around it without making decisions or judgements, noticing (ht Johnnie) new stuff and blurring other stuff into the overall picture and then carrying on with whatever I was doing. At some point an idea will start to germinate about what needs doing next given the current state of the place and our desire to reach those objectives. A bit later I'll start moving some stuff or building something which I will often stop building for days or weeks until the next bit of it becomes clearer.

I like the process and I'm pleased with the results but here's the thing, everything I build, the raised beds, the trellises, the garden workbench, the toolshed platform, every single thing, is screwed together because I completely expect that some of them will need dismantling and rebuilding or removing and replacing altogether at some future state of the process and I want to be able to reuse the parts.

I have no idea whether what I am doing is in fact right and as long as I am prepared to take apart something that doesn't, or ceases to work, I think I'm OK.

But I have no idea how I make those decisions or where they will lead. Now, what would you call that process? Because I want to see a lot more of it.

The other quibble is with this metaphor We're all surfers in a self-organising world. Some of us prefer the beach, and some of us think we're in charge of the wave. The challenge is to be in the flow of the wave.

Surfers have an exhilarating ride to be sure, but they can only ever end up back where they started, and the wave leaves them on the sand or dumps them on the rocks but it only ever takes them back to the place they left their towel and their car.I much prefer the metaphor of sailing. A sailor can go to any place they like, what they can't do is get there by any route they choose, they have to work with the prevailing conditions of sea and wind and their boat. Sometimes they need to tack across the wind for hours to achieve even some small headway towards their goal, and at other times they need to abandon the goal for a while and just ride out the storm.

The process requires determination, skill, patience, wisdom and persistence, but most of all it demands a direct and honest engagement with the reality you can perceive right now and a willingness to accept that the reality has changed on you, either because you have learned to see it better or because it has in fact changed.

Sailors need to listen to the sea as I listen to my garden and deal honestly with the facts of their situation, not those facts that they would like very much to be the case. Those who can't do that, or refuse to, are called strong or determined or leaders and, when they are also lucky they get away with it and are hailed as heroes. But that is just survivorship bias, most of those who act that way drown quite quickly and are erased from the story.

Meanwhile, we're so busy dreaming up desirable futures for each other, that we don't notice all the subtle changes that are going on around us anyway. And while we craft our master strategies, we don't even think about the little experiments we could make to nudge the system and see what happens.

You know, stuff we could do right now, or at least in the next day or so.

I'm starting to notice that the more discussions revolve around the importance of strategy, purpose and other such abstractions, the more likely I am to start daydreaming about what to have for tea or going for a nice walk somewhere.

I love it, nudge the system, see what happens, nudge it again. Its about the best we can do.

November 19, 2007

Since I moved to Auckland I have rediscovered the pleasures of a bit of land big enough that you can't spit over its longest axis. And in Auckland stuff grows pretty well, despite the clay under foot.

Yesterday, we dipped into the newly renovated gardens and threw together some salad for lunch out of what is popping up from the dirt. Mange-tout peas, radish, rocket, celery, letttuce, 2 types of parsely and some cold roast beetroot, seriously cool.

The first lot of peas is starting to wind down although the next lot is about to bloom and there are another half dozen in the seedling pots to plant out.

But what's better is that the zucchini and squash are about to hit the plate with the beans and tomatoes (hopefully) about 3 weeks away. And the Loquats are just hitting their straps as well, like eating pure gold.